Of Limits

Of Limits & Boundaries

As the world plunged into global chaos, many pre-existing socio-political fault lines have been brought to the fore. The pandemic and its consequent reverberating effects are but the triggers — they magnified and underscored the limits of our lives that we conveniently ignore. From social inequalities, discriminatory sentiments, to the fundamental self-care of our psyche, the momentary hiatus has afforded us to reconsider these values.

There exists now on the phenomenological level, either individually or through shared experiences, in which we face some form of a limit situation — moments when one encounters death, suffering, adversaries, anxiety, or freedom of choice in which the “human mind confronts the restrictions and pathological narrowness of its existing forms, and allows itself to abandon the securities of its limitedness, and so to enter new realm of self-consciousness.” German psychopathologist and existential philosopher, Karl Jaspers’ concept on ‘limit’ or ‘boundary situation’ is fitting as a framework in thinking about the unsettling vicissitudes brought about by the pandemic that has affected our personal, interpersonal, and social conditions.

Within these three layers, Of Limits exhibition presents 11 artworks by six artists from Southeast Asia that question the lines we draw consciously and subconsciously. Faced with escalating tensions and disorientations, these artists attempt to re-examine our basic concepts of borders, and hereafter examine our current state of liminality as the pandemic continues to unfold. Through recontextualising the Jaspersian limits of our ongoing crisis, one may think of boundaries quite literally as the distance between individuals, but may also consider those as invisible limits within our psyche or lines that keep disenfranchised groups on the fringe.

During the pandemic, the local and international media has highlighted stark disparities in living conditions between the privileged and marginalised. Kelly Limerick’s (b. 1991, Singapore) Brother (2021) highlights that very optics of how migrant workers had been Othered in Singapore. The term ‘brother’ evokes familiarity or endearment, yet ‘brother’ equally applies to calling out to a stranger who is insignificant for us to remember or care.

Against a freshly-knitted textile, Kelly Limerick dips her hand in dark paint, staining the clean woven fabric with the word ‘Brother’ in a gesture both invasive and counterintuitive. She then proceeds to unravel the yarn, and reknits it from a square to an elongated form, rendering the word illegible and its identity erased. Yet the paint marks remain woven into the very fabric of our society, reflecting the dissociation between the local community and the migrant worker ‘brothers’. Such nuances between the literal lines serve as a cognitive reminder of how quick our seeming 'brothering' of a certain marginalised group could be turned into 'Othering' such under the sensationalising effects of the media and within an echo chamber, testing the limits of our tolerance when our very own interests are at stake.

“The main point of this work was the process,” explains Kelly Limerick. “In going through this process to experience the menial, repetitive nature of labour, I attempt to understand the mindsets of migrant workers who, day in day out, work on the same tasks repeatedly towards an indistinct goal they might not even have an image of.”

Through engaging various different media – yarn, video, installation and performance, Kelly’s laborious processuality and performativity not only mirrors that repetitive labour of our ‘Brothers’’ work but also hints at the extensive amount of effort required to weave our ‘Brothers’ into our society. Through constructing, deconstructing and reconstructing, the transient nature of the artwork speaks to the state of liminality that the migrant workers experienced during the lockdown, and our own liminality in perceiving and engaging with such.

Along the same vein, Okui Lala’s As If, Home with Mostafa Kamal (2015) draws our attention to boundary situations that these communities face by addressing the complexities of translation, identities and belonging. Okui Lala aka Chew Win Chen (b. 1991, Malaysia) is known for her critical artistic practice with a socially-engaging front that includes transitory communities from Bangladesh and Myanmar. With the idea of translation being core to her methodology, she looks into how languages speak of a person’s roots and rootedness. Mostofa Kamal in the video starts off explaining eloquently in Malay how he had quickly learned the language from the ‘Brothers’ he works with. Speaking the local tongue in this case is integral to his assimilation in a foreign land.

She further dissects the meaning of translation by looking at how people may be “translated from familiar surroundings” to one that is not. Unlike how artists are often the central figure of their works, she reverses the role with Mostafa to learn from his expertise through building a model house. He ponders on settling down, kinship, home, and how the houses he builds never provided a sense of belonging. Especially prominent with border closures, notions of inequitable access and xenophobia are surfacing as the migrant community in Malaysia continues to face limit situations.

By juxtaposing Kelly Limerick’s Singaporean and Okui Lala’s Malaysian perspectives, we hope to extend the perception of ‘migrant workers’ beyond just construction workers, to also encompass the various other people that work across borders due to the porous migratory pattern between Singapore and Malaysia. Even across the world, the geographical divide is particularly felt by the diasporic communities as the sudden lockdown challenges how they negotiate the distance from their homeland.

As a diasporic Vietnamese in America, Quỳnh Lâm’s (b. 1988, Vietnam) videography diptych resonates with Okui Lala’s theme of uprootedness. The two works Betweenessee (2020) and Missing Link (2020) form a pair of visual and sonic exchange between the artist’s inner self and immediate surroundings by mirroring certain contingent elements comprising children’s songs, geopolitical maps, collected ephemera, and reenactments.

In Betweenessee, the artist goes back and forth between her childhood memories of the nostalgic tune Reo Vang Bình Minh and the peony garden just outside her studio in the United States, where she has been stuck throughout the pandemic. The song was penned by Lưu Hữu Phước some 70 years ago, prior to the America-Vietnam war and the ensuing intertwined histories between both countries. In Vietnamese, the lyrics paint an innocent and picturesque landscape of children cheering and singing in a flowery meadow immersed in scents, wind, and light – cleverly set against the present scenery, sans the kids.

Such representations are reversed in Missing Link. The protest song I Shall Not Be Moved provides a deeply spiritual link to the American South that is full of traumatic memories, while the bamboo – a cultural symbol of Vietnam – embodies the artist’s displaced identity after being literally ‘moved’ away from her hometown. The artist gives us an in-video performance with the bamboo leaves and fragments, onto which the words khắc xuất and khắc nhập are inscribed. In a popular Vietnamese folk story, these are the two magical chants that would make the hundred joints of a bamboo come together or fall apart – metaphorically signifying the construction and deconstruction of the diasporic Vietnamese identity. Through the dialogic of the present/past habitant and the past/present habitat, the artist seeks to dissect and reaffirm elements of the self by finding commonalities with other victims of trauma across space and time.

Quỳnh Lâm has been known for her experiment with organic flora materials both as subjects and media – in installations, performances and two-dimensional works – so it is not surprising to see such here. But uniquely, the very limitation of creative resources during a lockdown was turned into a refreshing interplay of media: organic plants within the lockdown zone, archival material, and self-performing acts. While navigating such limits, the artist perhaps has found much-needed resolutions for making sense of the self.

If Quỳnh Lâm’s way of coping with displacement is through bridging geographical, cultural and historical boundaries, then Hà Ninh Pham’s (b. 1991, Vietnam) search for his identity goes a step further in diffusing the boundaries of reality.

In 2016, when Hà Ninh Pham moved to the United States, the place was plagued with sectarianist political chaos. As also a migrant artist in search of his footing and identity, he avoided the partisan politics by creating his own make-believe universe. The ambitious project My Land (2017 – present) hence commenced and continues developing today as a series of cartography and structures with their own “systems of logic, language, and metrology”. It is a multi-year, multi-disciplinary, ever-expanding architecture that manifests into 2D drawings, 3D sculptures, writings, and a virtual game.

The interconnected landscape and architectural sketches manifest as a seemingly sci-fi universe with each structure conveying an ideology. As he stages, fantasises, manipulates his own mindscapes the sketches become a form of escapism and self-empowerment. When the artist fell ill during the isolation and had a surgery during the lockdown, the experience of limit situation had a huge impact on him. Thinking about human consciousness and subjectivities, his works started to take on a more organic form. “If I treat my work as an organic body that can grow, sometimes beyond my will, then the burden and responsibility of following the rules will be gone.”

The idea of liberation and gaining complete self-agency takes on an intrapersonal dimension when the audience of his Institute of Distance (2020) game is invited into this surreal universe. In spite of the individual's isolation, this immersive experience allows the audience to connect with the psyche of the artist. Amidst all the social conflicts that have arisen of late, he seeks solace in reclaiming control, entrusting the creative realm as a safe space.

Hà Ninh Pham’s exploration into the deeper psyche is paralleled with Crystal Sim’s (b. 1995, Singapore) intimate manipulation of her book – an outlet for her struggles with self-harm in recent times. In I’ll always be here for you (2020), she likens the blank canvas as an extension of her flesh. Working with multiple techniques such as embroidering, piercing, and crinkling the papers with saltwater, the artist pulls her internalised threads of tensions inside out onto each and every literal fibre of the work.

As one flips through the book, the sequence of photography turns from dark to light and repeats itself like episodes of mental struggles. Depressive and self-loathing messages are cached within the folded papers suggesting the fear that one may feel when seeking help. Even as the pages are pitted and scarred, textiles distressed and hanging on loose ends, the book holds itself together despite the flaws. 

With increasing time spent in isolation and constrained boundaries, topics on psychological barriers and mental wellness are abound. When one is in a limit situation, one “enters a liminal space betwixt and between familiarity and uncertainty that usually confers coextensive feelings of dread and anxiety.” These traumatic experiences remind us of human’s basic need for sociality and communal interaction.

Yet, as we crave for the eventual return to ‘normalcy’, Lala Bohang’s (b. 1985, Indonesia) experimental instructional videos The New Ways of Greetings (2020) provoke the consideration how human interaction in the post-pandemic world may be transformed. In this triptych, she explores new ways of doing common Indonesia greeting such as salaman (handshake), cipika cipiki (kissing on left and right cheeks), and salim (kissing the back of palm or receiving a senior person’s back of palm on your forehead). Even prior to the imposed distancing, different comfort levels among individuals had often led to confusing and awkward social interactions in reciprocating one’s greeting.

For what appears to be a whimsical imagination, her videos confront us to revisit how modes of sociality have been evolving with the boundary situation. Furthermore, with increased digital meetings replacing physical ones, will it come a day when we forget our fundamental need for touch and intimacy? Will there be a new language or new set of rules that govern our etiquettes and communality? It is therefore through exposing these parameters that we can continue bridging new systems of connections in spite of limits.

The role of art is to provide questions. By disputing assumptions, feeding curiosities, and rereading traditions, the discussed artworks dissect and assemble the various notions of psychological, interpersonal, and socio-political limits as they have been understood and experienced by us all. It is therefore through exposing these parameters that we can continue bridging new systems of connections in spite of limits.